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THE PLATFORM IS the MESSAGE James Grimmelmann* CITE AS: 2 GEO GEORGETOWN LAW TECHNOLOGY REVIEW THE PLATFORM IS THE MESSAGE James Grimmelmann* CITE AS: 2 GEO. L. TECH. REV. 217 (2018) Facebook and YouTube have promised to take down Tide Pod Challenge videos. Easier said than done. For one thing, on the Internet, the line between advocacy and parody is undefined. Every meme, gif, and video is a bit of both. For another, these platforms are structurally at war with themselves. The same characteristics that make outrageous and offensive content unacceptable are what make it go viral in the first place. The arc of the Tide Pod Challenge from The Onion to Not the Onion is a microcosm of our modern mediascape. It illustrates how ideas spread and mutate, how they take over platforms and jump between them, and how they resist attempts to stamp them out. It shows why responsible content moderation is necessary and why responsible content moderation is impossibly hard. And it opens a window on the disturbing, demand- driven dynamics of the Internet today, where any desire, no matter how perverse or inarticulate, can be catered to by the invisible hand of an algorithmic media ecosystem that has no conscious idea what it is doing. Tide Pods are just the tip of the iceberg. I. TIDE PODS Let’s talk about fake news. In 2015, The Onion published an “op- ed,” written from the perspective of a strong-willed small child, whose title tells it all: “So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods.”1 * Professor of Law, Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. This essay was written for the Governance and Regulation of Internet Platforms conference at the Georgetown University Law Center on February 23, 2018. My thanks to the participants and to Aislinn Black, Gus Andrews, Chris Peterson, and Chris Wiggins for their comments. This essay may be freely reused under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 [https://perma.cc/L9VD-NQYX]. 1 Dylan DelMonico, So Help Me God, I’m Going to Eat One of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods, ONION (Dec. 8, 2015, 3:00 AM), https://www.theonion.com/so-help-me- god-i-m-going-to-eat-one-of-those-multicolo-1819585017 [https://perma.cc/XZE5- QJ6Y]. The Onion revisited the joke in 2017, see Tide Debuts New Sour Apple Detergent Pods, ONION (Jul. 11, 2017, 3:29 PM), https://www.theonion.com/tide-debuts-new-sour- apple-detergent-pods-1819580060 [https://perma.cc/T5QH-ASBG]. 218 GEORGETOWN LAW TECHNOLOGY REVIEW Vol 2.2 But I know you people well enough by now to understand you’d never give in that easily, despite the complete futility of it. No matter how hard you try to play this pointless little game of keep-away, it’s not going to change a thing. Mark my words: One of these days, you’re going to badly underestimate me. “Oh,” you’ll say, “he can only really walk a couple steps at a time.” Or, “Oh, he’s only got four teeth.” Or, “Oh, we were able to stop him right before he drank that bright-colored antifreeze that one time, so this will be easy.” Please! Without even knowing it, you’re playing right into my hands! Because the instant you let your guard down for even a split second—BOOM!—it’s a detergent pod right down the hatch. Toddlers do eat detergent pods, along with other colorful but inedible household products like hand sanitizer and deodorant.2 But “Dylan DelMonico,” the purported moppet of an author, did not exist, and his profanely hyperarticulate “op-ed” was phrased in a way no actual toddler would talk. It was funny because it juxtaposed a strong-willed small child’s oral fixation with the stylistic conventions of a newspaper editorial. And the “op-ed” was plausible enough to be a joke because laundry detergent pods (which combine brightly-colored detergent and softener inside a water-soluble plastic coating) are the kind of thing a toddler might find attractive as potential food. But no actual toddler had that combination of raw primal hunger for a detergent pod and coldly rational plan to consume it. But a peculiar thing happened on the Internet between 2014 and today: grownups—or at least people genuinely old enough to know better—started eating detergent pods too. In late 2017, the “Tide Pod Challenge” swept across enough of the Internet to draw mainstream attention; all of a sudden, people were posting videos to YouTube of themselves trying to eat Tide Pods.3 2 Christopher Ingraham, There Were Over 12,000 Poison Control Calls for People Eating Laundry Pods Last Year, WASH. POST (Jan. 16, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/01/16/there-were-over-10000- poison-control-calls-for-people-eating-laundry-pods-last-year/ [https://perma.cc/YH76- R39F]. 3 Niraj Chokshi, Yes, People Really Are Eating Tide Pods. No, It’s Not Safe., N.Y. TIMES (Jan. 20, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/20/us/tide-pod-challenge.html [https://perma.cc/6S4Y-PKDE]. From here on, I will use “Tide Pods” to refer generically to laundry detergent pods when discussing the fad. People have eaten other brands of 2018 GEORGETOWN LAW TECHNOLOGY REVIEW 219 It wasn’t that The Onion was Tide Pod Mary4 and immediately inspired people to indulge their toddlers’ desire to chow down on them. “Dylan DelMonico’s” op-ed was neither the beginning nor the end of the idea of eating detergent pods. As far back as 2012, Senator Chuck Schumer held a press conference to warn that small children were eating them, complaining, “I don’t know why they make them look so delicious.”5 Nor did the Tide Pod Challenge take off immediately after the op-ed. Instead, it appears that in the following years, three things happened. First, meme culture absorbed the idea of eating Tide Pods.6 Memes became a suitable vehicle for jokes about the appeal of eating the pods.7 Like the Onion story, these uses operate at an ironic remove. The joke is that the Tide Pod is simultaneously attractive and repulsive; the desire to eat one is both genuine and pretended. As with all memes, everything is a quotation and a reference to the meme itself.8 Second, online video culture absorbed the idea of eating Tide Pods. In the same spirit that they filmed and posted themselves trying on new clothing, unboxing, skydiving, speed running, or eating dirt, YouTubers filmed themselves eating a Tide Pod—and then typically, gagging and spitting it out.9 (Laundry detergent is disgusting as well as toxic.) Again, this practice depends on a dual conceit: that eating a Tide Pod is appealing enough to be worth trying and appalling enough to be worth filming.10 detergent pods, but Tide Pods are popular and famous enough that “Tide Pod” became the trope namer. 4 JUDITH WALZER LEAVITT, TYPHOID MARY (Beacon Press 1996). 5 Schumer: Detergent Pods Are Too Cute, N.Y. DAILY NEWS (Sept. 9, 2012, 5:34 PM), http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/schumer-newfangled-detergent-pods-candy- article-1.1155442 [https://perma.cc/K2KM-SUPG]. 6 Reply All, Apocalypse Soon, GIMLET (Jan. 18, 2018), https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/114-apocalypse-soon [https://perma.cc/ULJ9- BJ57]. 7 Megan (@littlestwayne), TWITTER (Dec. 11, 2017, 1:49 PM), https://twitter.com/littlestwayne/status/940337792504049664 [https://perma.cc/A3XK- 9JCJ]. 8 See generally LIMOR SHIFMAN, MEMES IN DIGITAL CULTURE (MIT Press 2013). 9 It appears that the Challenge moved quickly from pretending to eat it (see e.g., TheAaronSwan669, TIDE POD CHALLENGE!!!, YOUTUBE (Jan. 7, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRbU77GFKA8 [https://perma.cc/FRQ6-KULX]) to people actually eating it (see e.g., big time gang, Eating a Tide Pod, YOUTUBE (Feb. 8, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F0Ew5mxQBY [https://perma.cc/J69C- XH2V]). Because YouTube now tries to remove actual Tide Pod Challenge videos, the example cited was deleted while this essay was being edited for publication. 10 See generally WHITNEY PHILLIPS & RYAN M. MILNER, THE AMBIVALENT INTERNET: MISCHIEF, ODDITY, AND ANTAGONISM ONLINE (2017). 220 GEORGETOWN LAW TECHNOLOGY REVIEW Vol 2.2 Third, dare cultures absorbed the idea of eating detergent pods. The Tide Pod Challenge (eat a Tide pod) joined the Cinnamon Challenge (eat a spoonful of powdered cinnamon in under a minute without drinking anything)11 and the Ice Bucket Challenge (dump a large bucket of ice water on yourself, albeit with a charitable angle).12 It also joined the long pre-Internet tradition of kids and teenagers daring each other to eat worms, lie down in a mud puddle, and do other exceptionally gross things. All of these trends swept across the Internet in early 2018, attracting the attention of mainstream media outlets. This drew even more attention, which was fuel for the memetic fire, leading to more Tide Pod tweets and videos. And thus it came to pass that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) tweeted “Please don't eat laundry pods;”13 Tide hired Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski to make a video telling people not to eat Tide Pods;14 and Facebook and YouTube vowed to take down videos of people eating Tide Pods.15 II. PARODY Let’s talk about fake news. Here is a question to ponder. When should Facebook and YouTube have started taking down Tide Pod content? Surely not the original Onion story—that was parody. But surely before the last-posted video as I write this—“Eating a tide pod” by “big time gang” with one view (mine)16—exactly what they have pledged to remove.17 But wait.
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